reached the end of her shift, bone-weary exhaustion made the climb up the stairs to her apartment all but impossible. She entered through her front door considerably less fearful than the night before, and collapsed straight onto the sofa, much to the annoyance of Jones. He skulked away and curled up at the far end, but not before giving her the stink-eye for making him move.
Tomorrow was Wednesday. No, wait, it was already Wednesday. Most of the town would be waking, heading off for the midpoint of their working weeks. Lucy, on the other hand, had two glorious days off ahead of her. Although, being on nights, it never quite felt that way. Still, two days off and no plans was all anyone could ever ask for.
She thought about Cain, wondering what the next few days might herald for him. Death, life, or something else? Would anyone be there for him as he went through it? Would that ex-wife who’d so spectacularly binned him come sit by his bedside?
No, there was no point thinking about that. Getting off the sofa, she crossed to her bookcase and ran her finger across the rows of Blu Rays and DVDs, pulling out every one featuring vampires. There were a fair few. She did the same for her bookcase, finding fewer printed monsters, but a few nonetheless. Taking the haul, she spread it out across her kitchen table, having to double stack in places — an indictment of both the table and the collection. She stared at it all and felt silly.
As someone who’d spent most of her drunken twenties at rock and goth nights in a city which didn’t have many of either, she’d known plenty of guys — and girls — over the years who’d fancied themselves creatures of the night. At least, they’d had a propensity for black clothes and bleak music, as though being aloof made them more attractive. To be fair, it had, sometimes.
Hell, she’d known at least two blokes who bleached their hair, wore black leather trench coats and called themselves Spike. Whatever happened to them? Did they ever run into each other, or did they phone each other at the start of the night to divvy up the turf? She had to hand it to them; it seemed to work for both of them — she rarely saw either leaving a dodgy night club alone, but then she rarely saw either with an abundance of friends.
She put away the films and books, phoned for a takeaway, and opened another bottle of wine. She was already halfway to sleep when the man knocked on her door with dinner and lasted little longer past that.
When she woke the next morning, Jones had finished her dinner and thrown it back up for her, but she’d slept long enough on the sofa that she could deal with such grimness despite the crick in her neck. Hell, she’d barely touched her wine.
Most of the day was gone, which, as always, felt a bit of a waste. If you get to live free two days of your week, it felt weird to spend half that time unconscious. But there was nothing for her to do. Her normal friends had boring weekday jobs. Maybe she’d go to the cinema, or the library, or the park. Luxuriate in the opulence of free time.
Or….
An hour later, she walked into the hospital, flashing a smile and her ID card at the confused receptionist in intensive care, a woman Lucy had met a few times but never gotten to know. ‘Just going to check on a patient,’ she said, without waiting for a reply.
The room was as dark as before, and as still. She let her eyes adjust and checked the chart. No change by the looks of it. He was still comatose, and his blood pressure and temperature were both off the chart.
‘It’s quite interesting,’ a voice said from the chair next to the bed.
Lucy let out a startled cry and leapt into the air. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ she hissed at Adam, sat in his chair, the same wry smile as before on his face. It was both maddening and reassuring. After all, it definitely didn’t make him look like a killer. He looked more like a male model, all high cheekbones and pale skin.
‘Sorry,’ he said, without sounding it. ‘You look nice,’ he added, sounding half surprised.
She was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt like it was the nineties. Hardly glamourous. She wondered how old he was. Maybe he was in his nineties.
‘You’re back.’
She paused. ‘I know him. Or knew him.’
‘I see.’
An awkward silence fell between them.
‘How is he?’ she said, going to check his charts, which hadn’t changed since the last time she looked.
‘He’s definitely going through the change,’ he said. ‘He will be dead before long, I’m afraid.’
‘I see.’
Adam got to his feet, dwarfing her instantly. He leaned over Cain. ‘I’ve never observed it like this. Usually it’s a hideous process, but the sleep your people put him in…’
‘Coma.’
‘It’s made the process easier. I suspect it won’t make the next bit easier, though.’
‘Death?’
‘The bit after.’
‘Oh.’
He looked up at her, and for the first time, she noticed his eyes. An ocean of melancholy swirling in dark hazel.
‘I’ll see him through it,’ he said sadly. ‘It was not what I wanted for him, but it is what is.’
She looked back at Cain, wondering desperately what was happening inside that body of his. She was no biologist — she’d been known to joke over a pub table she was more butcher than doctor — but the possibility of there being vampires in the world and one transforming on a hospital bed before her was… intriguing. Also, completely impossible. Some part of her brain kept insisting on that. The man in the chair was just a man, and anything Cain was going through was a result of extreme trauma, not folklore.
And yet. None of that was true.
Already she could feel the part of her brain that allowed her to kneel over a child with a broken limb and not want to scream taking over. Here before her was a medical marvel; but nobody knew that except the people in this room. Or it was just another patient.
She looked back at Adam, and a shiver ran down her spine. She was sharing a room with a myth (or just a man), albeit one in a distinctly pleasant form, and she had the chance to walk away — probably the safest course, whether all of this was real or not. If this was all just some show, the man opposite her was a fraud. If it wasn’t, he was a monster.
‘Well,’ she said, patting her hands against her thighs as though to emphasise the point, ‘I had better be going.’
‘Wait,’ Adam said, crossing the gap between them at speed. Lucy stepped back involuntarily, almost crashing into Cain’s IV.
‘I don’t feel like this is the best introduction.’
‘Introduction to what?’
‘To us. To me.’
She laughed. ‘In terms of possible interactions with a… whatever you are… this has probably gone about as well as expected, what with me not being eaten.’
‘Sure.’ He frowned. ‘I’ll let you go,’ he said, and returned to his seat.
This was it. Her last chance to turn her back on all this, to walk back to her normal life. There are few times in our lives when we can consciously choose between two wildly different paths, Lucy knew, and one was right there before her. On one — safety, security. On the other — who the hell knew?
She knew in an instant which path she should take, and which she would.
‘What did you want to say?’ she asked.
‘I wondered if you wanted to get a drink with me. A coffee. I could explain better.’
‘You’re asking me out?’ she asked, with a half laugh.
The smirk returned. ‘I guess I am, yes.’
Lucy’s cheeks reddened, and she found that despite of everything, of every instinct, she was deeply drawn to him.
But before she could answer, something crossed Adam’s face. He turned to the door as it opened with a crash. Lucy turned to it, too, expecting a harassed nurse, but four new people walked in. Two men, two women, each looking as though they’d walked straight out of a music video.
She could sense Adam’s hackles go up from across the room, though there was no discernible shift in his being.
She should have walked out the door a moment earlier.
‘Adam,’ one woman said. She had flawless skin, her features arranged in an impossibly porcelain doll way, offset by heavy makeup around her eyes and a crop of bleached blonde hair. If Adam didn’t look like her mental image of a vampire, this woman tried a bit too hard to fit it. ‘New pet?’
‘Go fuck yourself, Autumn,’ Adam snarled, revealing his teeth to show extended laterals, sharp and gleaming white.
‘Easy,’ one of the other newcomers said, a man who looked a lot like Adam, except he had blond curtains. The last time Lucy had seen him, he’d been on the floor with a gaping wound in his chest. Dead.
It was real. All of it.
Adam noticed the man, too. ‘You,’ he hissed, his voice deepening into a growl. ‘What’s he doing here?’
‘We’re here to claim our newest recruit,’ Autumn replied. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘He was mine,’ Adam hissed back.
This seemed to take the woman aback. She cocked her head slightly toward the blonde. ‘You took from our own?’
‘That became clear later,’ the blonde man said. ‘I had instruction. He tried to kill me.’
The woman sighed. ‘For fuck’s… Adam, whatever transgression has occurred here, on either side, I was unaware. You have the right to tribunal, if you so desire.’
‘I waive it,’ Adam replied, his voice still full of menace. ‘So long as your new friend here explains what he means by instruction. Who gave you this name, boy?’
The blonde made no move to answer Adam’s question, but bristled at being called boy.
They seemed to have forgotten about Lucy, but she didn’t dare move a muscle, on the off chance that continued. She had to assume all four new arrivals were monsters, which made her position as the only potential food source in the room somewhat precarious.
The vampires faced each other down, the group of four waiting for some movement clearly not forthcoming from Adam. The silence stretched into uncomfortable, on to weird, and kept going. Lucy was terrified to even breathe, especially once she realised she was the sole one in the room doing so.
‘What about my right to tribunal?’ the blonde one asked. He had an accent, Lucy realised, Eastern European or Russian.
Autumn hissed at him and stood down from her staring contest. It was as though air had been allowed back in the room for the first time. Without a word, she and her three companions turned back toward the door.
‘Autumn,’ Adam said, stopping her in her tracks. ‘What about the convention?’
‘Prichádza tma,’ she replied with a smile, and left.
Adam looked bereft — whatever those words meant, they were not good news.
He turned to Lucy, his fangs away once more. ‘You should leave,’ he said, his eyes not catching hers. Was he… afraid?
‘I work here,’ she said. ‘Are you saying I’m in danger?’
He paused. ‘No,’ he said, but the pause was too long for it to be truth.
‘What the hell is going on?’ she asked. ‘What is this?’
He stared in silence for a moment. ‘I can’t…’
A scream pierced the air from the corridor outside. Lucy moved to the door but Adam got there first, bursting through the door in full attack mode, his movements beyond anything her brain could process.
Autumn and the other four vamps were in the hallway, by the nurse’s station. The blonde one had a nurse by the neck, holding her up with no effort as her legs flailed around and her face turned redder and redder.
‘Put her down,’ Adam growled. He squinted under the harsh strip lighting. All four of the vamps squared up against him had sunglasses on and showed no such issue.
‘Make me,’ the blonde growled back.
‘Let’s take a breath here,’ Autumn said. ‘Give us the turn, and we’ll leave quietly. I know you, Adam, you don’t want us to have to take him.’
‘I don’t want him becoming part of your toxic crusade, either,’ Adam replied.
‘He’ll have the same choice we all have,’ one of the other vamps said. The other woman. Jet black skin, dark hair, and clothes sleek enough for a runway. ‘You’re the first one to say no. What makes you think he will?’
‘He’s a good person.’
Autumn laughed. ‘This is becoming tiresome. You can be the dissenting voice as much as you like, but you know what happens in the end. You know where this ends.’
‘You only think you do.’
‘This is pointless,’ the blonde said. ‘Give him to us or I kill this woman, and every human in this damn hospital.’
Adam sneered. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’
Lucy wasn’t so sure. The finality in the vampire's tone suggested he’d be happy to carry out the threat.
‘Please,’ the nurse said, her voice choked by the grip of the taller woman. ‘Help me.’
Autumn returned her own sneer. ‘Hand him over, Adam. I know you don’t want this much blood on those clean hands of yours.’
Lucy watched as Adam cooly surveyed his options, his gaze looking from door to door. Lucy did the same, though her options depended entirely on his choices. He could grab his friend and run, leaving Lucy and a hospital full of people at the mercy of the vampires. Perhaps they’d get lucky, and he’d draw them away.
‘Take him,’ Adam said, sullenly.
The briefest hint of surprise flickered across Autumn’s face before she motioned for the two vamps behind her to move forward, leaving her and the blonde male vampire holding his hostage before them. The two other vamps walked past Lucy as though she weren’t there, into the darkened room where Cain lay oblivious to the arguments over his stricken body.
‘Wait,’ a doctor said, hovering near the back of the room, unnoticed. ‘If you move him, you’ll kill him.’
‘He’s already dead,’ Autumn said, motioning to the two vamps inside the room. Lucy turned her head just enough to see the tubes being yanked out of Cain, before one vampire slung the dying body over their shoulder.
‘This isn’t over,’ Adam said.
Autumn’s look said otherwise. Lucy didn’t much care, as long as everyone got out alive, including the nurse still held aloft by the blonde one. Cain wouldn’t, but she’d already understood he wouldn’t be walking out of here. The nurse flopped lifelessly back and forth with every movement of her captor’s arm, eyes open but lolling about her skull. Passed out, Lucy hoped. All alternatives were worse.
‘Put her down,’ Lucy said, to the blonde one.
The attention of five vampires who’d barely noticed her existence moved slowly to her.
‘Your pet is talking,’ Autumn said.
‘Not a pet,’ Lucy said, the anger creeping up her neck overwhelming the part of her brain telling her to shut up. ‘Put her down.’
‘Or you’ll do what?’ the blonde male said.
Lucy didn’t have an answer.
‘We got what we came for,’ Autumn said, letting Lucy’s big mouth off the hook. The vampires regrouped, Cain’s limp body held between them. The blonde one set down the unconscious nurse on the counter, and they marched out of the ward, down the corridor.
Lucy rushed over to the nurse, checking her pulse first. Strong. Good. The doctor joined her, standing uselessly beside her. ‘Go get a nurse,’ Lucy shouted at him, a little harshly. He disappeared. Lucy grabbed the hands of the nurse and rubbed them, trying to rouse her.
Adam stood staring down the corridor, shoulders tense and fists balled.
‘Are you going to stand there being useless, or are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ Lucy asked him.
He shook his head. ‘I have to go,’ he said, and turned to follow them.
‘Hey, wait,’ she said, but he ignored her. She couldn’t leave the nurse unattended, so she had to wait for the doctor to return.
By the time he brought a nurse back, the vampire was nowhere to be seen.
‘We have to call security, and the police,’ the doctor said, trying to take charge now there was no danger.
Lucy ran to the window and opened the blinds, spilling the dying daylight from outside. That meant he wouldn’t go out that way, right? She didn’t know, but if it was true, it narrowed his options somewhat. And the other four vampires, for that matter.
She ran to the lift, ignoring the protestations of the doctor, who was busy calling the cops already. Both lifts had gone to the basement already. She hit the button, but neither made its way back up.
Security barged through the wide fire doors, ignoring her on their way back up the ward. She ducked through the door and rushed down the stairs. Only a few stories, she may even catch them.
Bursting through the door, she entered the brightly lit but somewhat dank car park. This was staff parking — the public had to use the one across the road which charged in increments akin to mortgage statements. This one was full of the shitty old bangers of the nurses and ancillary staff, next to the Audi’s and Beamers of the surgeons and doctors. There was no sign of Adam or the other vampires. Part of Lucy was relieved, the majority still angered.
As the cloud of anger cleared, staring out at the concrete walls, she realised she should head back inside, wait for the police. Abducting a patient was a serious business, especially when the patient was likely killed in the effort, and she would need to recount what she’d seen, as well as why she’d been there. She wasn’t sure she could do either without either lying or sounding certifiable. Neither sounded appealing.
Even if she spoke to the police, it wouldn’t help the fact she’d put herself on the radar of immortal beings capable of immense violence. Not quite how she’d hoped her day off would go.
‘They’re gone,’ a voice said from behind her. She whirled round to find Adam leaning against the wall. ‘So, what do you want to know?’